Monday, December 8, 2008

Still Trucking.. I've picked up a contractor gig with a local consulting company, possibly on-site support for 6 clinics, and I just started the Holiday discount at VFEmail.

Oh and I got my Security+ and CCNA certifications! WooHoo!

So in addition to VF IT Services www.vfit.biz, I'm also doing contracting for Sweet Consulting. I've just finished a quickie project of upgrading/integrating SpamAssassin and Horde/Ingo on Etch. There was a little bit of funkiness, as the current setup had the inboxes mail stored locally but the subfolders were in the user's home directory. Just a minor tweak to the ingo driver to write the correct path to the procmail script, and we were good to go.

I also integrated IMAPSync into VFEmail over the weekend. I sent some patches to the Horde folks, and to the IMAPSync dude. Nothing too spectacular. Minor changes to fetchmail in horde to allow more flexibility with external drivers, and IMAPSync '--quiet' and email reporting functions. I really burned myself with Horde before and all my custom code, rather a pita to update. I've got most of it out of the base code now, the last update I did went rather well. I have two RAID cards coming, soon I'll have dual OpenSolaris boxes to put the backend's onto. I was going to use AFS/ZFS HOT Replication, but you need a buttload of drives to do it decently. Using zfsreplicate seems to be a better way. I can utilize much of the disk space, and still have small updates which will allow for an off-site hot backup. I still have a couple issues to work out with that setup though. I have to do a better job with creating domains across all servers so I can start to provide private domains pointed to local accounts.

VF IT Services is moving slower than I had hoped, but it is moving. I got a call to support some clinics in WI, we'll see if that goes through. I'm just a poor sales man. My resume looks nice, but I just can't do that 'Sell Yourself' thing. The other problem I have with resume's is people taking credit for things they oversaw. Like: "Migrated network from Novell to Windows". The majority of people who have that sort of thing in their resume did nothing more than oversee the work. I have a difficult time presenting accomplishments as 'hands on' by default.

I also bought another fxs card for my Asterisk box, and I'm migrating our home number to it. Should be way cheaper than we're paying now for a land line.

Oooooo and on the super-cool front - I found a board that converts RGB-CGA/EGA to VGA! That means I can take any Arcade board (except Nintendo) and just wire it up to a regular monitor. I think that's HUGE. Computer monitors are so much cheaper than Arcade ones, and with the conversion to LCD, there are a lot of CRTs looking for a home...

About Me

IT Guru. Been doing this stuff for 20 years - everything from desktop support to server builds to network/Internet anything and PCI Compliance/InfoSec.
Built and operated VFEmail.net from the ground up in 2001 until today.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rickromero